March 5, 2012 | Peter Sterlacci | Believe. Become. Be Your Brand

4 Places to Avoid ‘Injuring’ Your Personal Brand

I am an active person and when I am feeling stressed or anxious my cure is to jump on my bicycle and head for the mountains.My own personal brand attributes include “action” and “energy.” So when I suffer from an injury, muscle strain, or cold it is hard to resist the temptation to just ‘suck it up’ and ride anyway.

However, every athletic person will tell you that you need to let your body recover. Pushing yourself through an injury will only make things worse. By resting you actually bounce back stronger than before. I had to remind myself about this recently after a back injury was preventing me from my regular rides.

Is Your Brand Suffering from a Set Back?

When we decide to embark on the personal branding process we are so energized to do as much as we can to be our brands. We get feedback from others about our brand attributes, we start creating the online and offline tools to communicate our brand, and we consistently and constantly manage our brands in our daily lives.

The process is motivating as we start to see the fruits of our labor and the results of our hard work. However, along the way we may suffer from a setback – something that has perhaps caused a strain in our personal branding effort. In such cases, we need to avoid the temptation to push forward and risk injuring our brand. We need to take a break and let our brand recover. [Read more...]

Are Japanese and Indians Effectively Using Twitter for Personal Branding?

For our February post Dr. Amit and I chose to discuss the role of Twitter in India and Japan as well as tips on how to successfully manage your brand using Twitter.

View from Japan: Is Japan the Twitter Nation?

Last year I read an article calling Japan “The Twitter Nation”. Recent data clearly supports this. The number of Japanese internet users who tweet is close to 17% surpassing Americans at about 10%. Twitter also estimates that Japanese write nearly 8 million tweets a day, which is close to 14% of the global total! Twitter really gained credibility in the country after the massive earthquake and tsunami devastated the Tohoku region on 3/11/11. New users flocked to the network for real-time information about the nuclear crisis, blackouts, and aftershocks. Now with the huge number of users in Japan, workshops are cropping up helping individuals to learn the tricks of the tweet as well as companies to use the platform to reach consumers and get feedback.

Clearly the personal and corporate branding potential for Twitter is huge in Japan. Here are 5 quick Twitter tips I share with my clients in Japan. [Read more...]